Author: flipaoXIX

Taste (book) Recipes:

Pasta con Aglio e Olio:

  • 3 garlic cloves, sliced
  • 4 tbsp olive oil
  • 500g spaghetti
  • <->
  • Saute the garlic in the olive oil until lightly browned
  • Boil spaghetti until al dente
  • Drain pasta and toss with oil and garlic mix.
  • Add salt, pepper and paprika to taste.

Eggs with tomate:

  • 50ml olive oil
  • 1 medium/large onion, thinly sliced
  • 200g whole plum tomates can
  • 4 large eggs
  • <->
  • Warm the oil in a frying pan over medium heat.
  • Add onions, cook until soft.
  • Add tomatoes, crush them with the spoon. Cook for 20 minutes aprox.
  • Break the eggs into the pan and cover it. Decrease heat at medium-low.
  • Cook until the whites are opaque and the yolks are firm. 5 minutes aprox.
  • Add salt/peper.

Book: Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well by Pellegrino Artusi

Spaghetti with lentils

  • 1/2 carrot finely chopped
  • 1/2 onion finely chopped
  • 1/2 stalk of celery chopped
  • 1/2 garlic clove sliced
  • 3 tbsp olive oil
  • 165g dried brown lentils, rinsed
  • 250g spaghetti
  • 350g marinara sauce
  • <–>
  • In a large saucepan, saute’ the carrots, onion, celery and garlic in the olive oil over medium-low heat until soft.
  • In another medium saucepan, fill it with the lentils, add water until cover them over 1 finger. Simmer and cook until tender. 20 mintes aprox. Remove from heat and set aside
  • Break the spaghetti into pieces using a dish towel. Then cook the spaghetti in salted water until al dente.
  • Drain the lentils and add them to the vegetables.
  • Add the marinata sauce. Bring to simmer, cover and cook until the lentils have blended with the sauce. 10 min aprox.
  • Add drained pasta with 1/2 cup of pasta water.
  • Season with salt/pepper
  • Simmer all for 3-5 minutes to combine flavours.

Frittata

  • 5-6 large eggs
  • 4 tbsp olive oil
  • pinch chopped parsley
  • pinch grated parmigiano-reggiano
  • salt/pepper
  • <–>
  • Crack the eggs into a bowl and beat them with a fork.
  • In a frying pan, heat the olive oil up.
  • Season the eggs and add parsly
  • Once hot, add the eggs to the pan.
  • Scramble the eggs with a spatula, tipping and moving the pan continuously to make sure the eggs dont stick.
  • Add cheese and flip the frittata. Cook for 1 minute until golden.

Carbonara

  • Guanciale: cured pork cheek
  • eggs
  • pecorino cheese
  • dried pasta
  • <–>
  • Saute fatty, peppery strips of guanciale in a deep saucepan
  • Cook pasta al dente.
  • Add pasta to the guanciale.
  • Turn off heat, add mixed eggs. Toss
  • Add cheese and some pasta water.
  • Toss all together.

FAQ me

I finished this book last night. It was a recommendation from a friend and I downloaded it some time ago into my kindle. I dont read very often in kindle as i prefer the paper touch but I didnt have anything else at hand so I gave it a go.

I didnt have a clue what was all about, I didnt know the person. And I only checked his history this morning.

In summary, the book is interesting, I liked to read about his personality and treats. Every person is different and it was good to read about his weakness, errors, fears, etc. As he says several times, you have to “bleed” in your writing.

Something that is repeated in the book is the daily practice and his four bodies theory:

  • Physical
  • Emotional: get rid of negative influences, surround yourself with positive ones
  • Mental: write ideas
  • Spiritual: be grateful for what you have, focus on the present, surrender.

He talks about everything and anything. From dating, something important to me, he is clear that there is no magic bullet, you have to go meet people (he insists in tango and cooking classes :), and use all tools available. So there is no short cut.

He talks about being an idea-generating machine. And that takes practice. Write ten ideas, tomorrow another ten, etc. Analyze them, cross them, redefine them, etc.

He is very clear that working for enterprise in the corporate America is the worse you can do, he pushes to be en entrepreneur. And he recommends these books about economics.

I should have taken more notes though. Interesting read, although checking his blog, he hasnt written for a couple of years but he does youtube now.

Anyway, I think it was worth reading it.

LLM: hardware connection

Good article about LLM from the hardware/networks perspective. I liked it wasnt a show-off from Juniper products, as I haven’t seen any mention of Juniper kit in deployments of LLM in cloud providers, hyperscalers, etc. The points about Infiniband (the comment at the end about the misconceptions of IB is funny) and ethernet were not new but I liked the VOQ reference.

Still as a network engineer, I feel I am missing something about how to make the best network deployment for training LLM.

Curl, Yaml, scalars, Elixir, git stash

I haven’t watched this video, but looks like the holly book of curl!!!

Rant about yaml. And something I learned about yaml some months ago and forgot about it: scalars for making multiline work in yaml.

Elixir: a programming language based on Erlang. Really impressive reports! But still I would like to learn golang (if I ever learn properly python 🙂

git stash: I didnt know about this git command until last week, very handy.

Teufelssee

A friend of mine asked to go on picnic to a nearby lake: Teufelssee. The place was really nice, I could swim and the water was perfect! Although I was murdered by mosquitos… The lake is inside a forest and is huge, really impressive thinking that I was so close to the city. As well, we visited Teufelsberg, there were nice graffiti and good views from the top.

Totally agree!!

Of course!

There are worse thins in life 🙂

As well, the local neighbourhood Grunewald was interesting. While cycling could amazing town houses.

Arroz de pimenton y pasas

This is a recipe from my friend M that is super easy and tasty!

Ingredients:

  • 1.5 cups of paella rice (or risotto) – DONT TRY ANY OTHER RICE TYE
  • 3 cups of boiling water (2:1 ratio with rice)
  • 80g of fresh parsley (if possible, if dried, using 5gr or so)
  • 7 cloves of garlic sliced
  • 1/2 cup or raising or similar
  • 2 tsp of sweet smoked paprika (I used an Spanish branh)
  • Olive oil to fry garlic and a gulp of the rice.
  • Salt/pepper to taste

Process

  • Pre-heat oven at 180C
  • In a ovenproof container, put the rice, chopped parsley and paprika. Mix all well.
  • Fry the garlic with plenty of oil.
  • Pour the fried garlic and left over oil into the rice. Mix all well so the oil reaches all rice.
  • Pinch of salt/pepper.
  • Add 3 cups of boiling water. Mix all well.
  • Put the container into the oven for 30 minutes.
  • Taste the rice before removing from the oven.

Ready to eat!

Before putting into the oven and before adding the water:

After taking it out from the oven:

Very tasty! Although I originally used more than 2 tsp of paprika. So for next time, I will stick with just 2 and will see

Ultralearning

I finished this book last Sunday. I have heard about some interesting achievements like getting a full MIT degree in one year so I wanted to know more about how was that achieved and what I could learn and apply to myself (if possible). I liked the challenge of learning a language each months… with a total exposure and not able to talk English. Honestly, I want to learn German and I want to do it quickly but properly so I want to take some pieces of advice from the book and apply to my case.

I think this can ge a good technique to master specific subjects. But at the end of day, in my opinion, it is all about focus. And that’s my problem, I want to do too many things.

So in summary, the ultralearning process is based on the following principles:

1- Metalearning: It is the research part. You need to know what you want to learn and how to do it.

2- Focus: It is about getting into flow and efficiency. If you dont have the luxury of dedicating 10h a day to your projects. Make the most of your time. And if you have issues, build the habit and strength bit by bit. You want to learn something challenging and difficult, keep it in mind. I liked the example about Mary Somerville. She was a housewife and mother. Still managed to be a top Mathematician!

3- Directness: Currently in schools, university, etc, most of the things we learn dont have a direct application to the practical world. This is knowledge transference. So it you want to learn python, well, use python. So go direct to want you want to learn. If you want to move your career to the AI/ML network infrastructure, you will have to find the technologies (infiniband, GPU, etc) used and learn from them so your CV can be taken into account.

4- Drill: Find your weakness and work on them. Here I learned about the experiences from Benjamin Franklin in his autobiography.

5- Retrieval: trying to recall facts and concepts from memory. The example here is Srinivasa Ramanujan. Free recall tests, in which students need to recall as much as they can remember without a cue, perform better than getting a cue.

6- Feedback: I liked the intro: “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth”. Myke Tyson. So testing if we are actually learning, improving it is very important. And how we get that feedback as well.

7- Retention: Another good intro. “Memory is the residue of though” Daniel Willingham. And the example is the World Champion of French Scrabble who didnt speak French, Nigel Richards. So it is about how not forget things. In this kind of challenges, where you are getting a lof of data, it is easy to start forgetting. So the goal is to keep that knowledge, that is with practice (different methods mentioned).

8- Intuition: here the example is mainly Richard Feynman. Main points are: 1) Dont give up on hard problems easily. 2) Prove things to understand them. 3) Start with a concrete example. 3) Be deeply skeptical about your own understanding.

9- Experimentation: It is trying things outside the specific subject you are studying. The example here is how Vincent Van Gogh learnt to paint.

I have read about the Laszlo Polgar experiment about raising his daughters as Chess prodigies but the book gives more details and actually found it even more interesting! I was surprised by the initial “macho” comments from Kasparov… More info about Judit.

In general, nice book, I want/need to put things into practice.

Remove Bike Pedals

A couple of weeks ago I had to remove the pedals from my bike and I struggled big time. I followed this video for instructions and it was very good. As I didnt have enough time, I only managed to buy the standard spanner key that fitted the screw but that key didnt offer me enough leverage to actually remove the screw and no mutter how hard (or I am not strong enough), I failed. I decided to go to a nearby bike shop and they were nice enough to unscrew the pedals for me in 3 sec… using a pedal spanner like the video. So maybe I need to get one of those for the future (and remember how to actually remove the pedals).